FoonLudum Dare ExplorerUsers → Noel Widmer

Noel Widmer

Games

YearLDThemeGameDivisionRankOvFuInThGrAuHuMo
202148Deeper and deeperTato - Potatocompo5263.353.683.122.813.143.043.403.25
202046Keep it alive👥Keep it burning!jam15533.353.032.913.593.723.322.233.49

Performance over time

overall score (left axis) percentile (right axis)

Scatterplots

Fun vs Overall

Innovation vs Overall

Theme vs Overall

Graphics vs Overall

Audio vs Overall

Humor vs Overall

Mood vs Overall

Comments by Noel Widmer

LD46 — Keep it alive

Rampage by PhilStrahl 2020-04-21T21:18:33Z

Hi Phil, I was looking for a link to your LD game. Finally found it on your twitter :P The game plays very well. I love the graphics the art and the level design. Although the level where you start on the other side of the mountain is a bit weird because ramy dies quite quickly. I think you didn't account for players dashing diagonally. Are you maybe not normalizing the input or movement correctly? Dashing diagonally is way faster than dashing vertical or horizontal. I used this glitch to simplify the harder levels :D

Joe Biden Campaign Simulator by Kevin Sun 2020-04-21T01:29:31Z

This was weird, but also funny :D It took me two rounds to figure out that I cannot hold the buttons but have to press/release them. We could also use some more feedback on the pose results. The arrows on the left really helped but sometimes I advanced a pose and didn't realize it. Aside from that it is an interesting idea.

LD46_Charger by Talia 2020-04-21T10:10:26Z

The sound was simple yet effective. And the graphics are beautiful. I liked it a lot. After a few plays I finally understood that I don't need the batteries in order to power the lights. Some introduction levels which teach the core mechanics could really help here. The first level already felt kindof advanced (even if it was easy). In my first play I won the first level but had no idea if I was doing it correctly. And when I got to harder levels I didn't really understood all the mechanics as I said. It required multiple plays. A great experience overall, very well polished. Congrats :D

Party Pooper by kookiedough 2020-04-21T00:25:39Z

I like the idea. I understood the concept pretty quickly although I am still unsure if my actions actually increase the party's length. A little explanation (of some sort) could have helped in order to inform the player about his goals. The pause menu doesn't really pause the game by the way :P

Sisters' Lighthouse by imod 2020-04-21T20:13:32Z

Visual Novels don't really apeal to me to be honest. But this one was able to keep me interested until "the end". I had goosebumps during the voice acting and liked the turn in events. The graphics and the audio are great. There were some typos and grammar issues in the english version (which should be avoided in a text based game I think) but it didn't bother me much :)

Doomsday Deliveries by Human Writes Code 2020-04-21T07:32:46Z

The soundtrack is pretty cool :D It took me a while to figure out that I didn't need to find the package first. After I figured that out I was able to quickly deliver a few packages. Some sort of awareness to the rockets would also be nice. I got hit a few times without realizing it.

Dying Concerto by Johannimations 2020-04-21T19:58:24Z

The music is awesome. Did you made that yourself? Very impressive! It was a fun experience to listen to the music and run around like an idiot for a few minutes :P I pushed some balls into the corner and couldn't get them out anymore. And balls behind the boxes cannot really be seen anymore.

Dying Concerto by Johannimations 2020-04-21T20:20:24Z

@johannimations The sound is truly impressive. It reminds me of Banjo Kazooooie's music; especially Freezy Peak (youtube.com/watch?v=bKv9WeS8BOs). Maybe it's just similar because the instruments seem to be similar :P In my previous comment I just wanted to let you know about the issues. I always like to know where the biggest problems are. Sometimes us developers focus on issues that don't seem to be very important. And to hear what truly bothers the players can be very interesting.

The Well of the Past by Chocolat-Endive 2020-04-20T23:53:00Z

The music was amazing. I wish I was able to compose something like that. I would have loved to feel a bit more "born into the world". The story starts and I didn't really felt very connected to the character. I am not good storyteller myself (that's why I can't give exact tips). I just felt like watching the story unfold and not being a big part of it. Maybe a goal early on would have helped. I really liked it aside from that :D

Keep it burning! by Kevin Meissner 2020-04-21T01:10:36Z

Thank you very much for your feedback so far :D We will consider adding configurable input (for mouse sensitivity) after we get some rest. In the meantime it might be a good idea to switch to a controller if your sensitivity is too low. "The mouse works on my machine" as naive developers would say :P

Keep it burning! by Kevin Meissner 2020-04-21T19:00:43Z

@splitpainter Very good question. What worked for us in "Keep it burning!" was to reduce coordination as much as possible. We didn't had time to come up with a common understanding of a "good structured project" since we only met a few days before the jam. Assign topics to people and let them be the soul editor of that topic. Simplified example of our work: we had 1 visual artist and 1 sound artist which are already well isolated topics. Then we had a character engineer, an achievement/settings/game events engineer and a procedural map generator engineer (the map is procedurally generated even if we ended up using fixed seeds in the final version because random seeds were not fun to play). We seldom had to work in someone elses domain which reduced the number of issues that could have happened.

Keep it burning! by Kevin Meissner 2020-04-22T15:49:08Z

@raivk The sensitivity is an interesting problem. Setting it to 30% makes my mouse way too fast. I thought nobody would ever use the 100% setting. Classic. We might increase it even further if it is still too low. Thank you for the feedback :)

Where`s my Pills by colan 2020-04-21T19:50:03Z

Thank you for adding controller support. This saved me :D I was finally able to take all the pills! I love platformer and your game has been well executed. I took some shortcuts but it felt like I was learning more about the game since I was forced to go faster on each attempt. The biggest thing that could have been improved are the controls. They felt a bit too harsh. Sometimes the character doesn't jump when I expect him too (brobably because I already walked over an edge). And steering while falling is really hard. Great game overall!

Rainy Day by Mat_Mox 2020-04-21T00:59:18Z

Audio and Mood will get a great score from me. I really felt the foxyness during the initial text section. I would have kept the music on during the gameplay, simply because it is that great (maybe you could have tuned it just a bit down during the gameplay to increase the rain effect). Keyboard controls need some rework. For me "s" was down, "d" was right, "u" was forward and I didn't figure out how I could go left. Controller works good though :) I also wasn't able to get to the first light. Not sure what I am missing but the torch kept going out before I was able to reach it.

Energence by noirdrive 2020-04-21T00:17:40Z

I love the sound and the art style. Very well made! The idea of showing the controls before the game starts and letting the player figure out the controls before the menu shows up is cool. I immediatly grabbed my controller and wanted to use that. I think it would be awesome if the game would support controllers. Unfortunately I cannot figure out how to make it over the first gap. I might be missing something (sorry). Let me know how I can make it over the spikes and I'd love to give it a another shot :D

ENGORGE by Slothtimistic 2020-04-21T01:19:04Z

Oh no, I NEED MORE BLOOD. Looks and sounds really nice :D I like the art style and the voice acting. ;D There could have been more voices, they sound really nice. It felt a bit unfair in the end because I couldn't really find anymore victims. Maybe there could have been some mechanic to bring new victims towards the player or something?

Ladder Man and the Escort Mission of Doom by Lyrdl 2020-04-21T00:49:47Z

Very interesting idea! This reminds me of "Getting Over It". It took me a while to figure out how to walk (because you seem to be unable to walk while the ladder is not fully extended). I did not get very far to be honest, because it is quite hard to get the main character on an upper level. I am still unsure how to do that properly, hmmm.

Save the City by RMHeuer 2020-04-20T23:42:07Z

I'd recommend to upload some executable. Not everyone is willing to figure out how to run a jar :)

Survivalgo by despdair2 2020-04-20T23:54:27Z

I love the idea, the artstyle and the ambient sound. I had something similar in mind for other themes (but they were of corse not selected). The lose/win conditions need some work. Loosing on the first level won't restart the level. And I cannot restart it because the buttons only spawn in level 2. That means the player needs to restart the game. And it appears that the game won't acknowledge a victory if I achieve it using 2 runs without a restart.

LD48 — Deeper and deeper

w o r m by neverautomatic 2021-04-27T18:10:58Z

@neonjeff Here we meet again lol. The Worm Trio has found each other! :D

Anyways. I didn't understand that I could eat rooks until I went all the way to the right and to the left and realized that there is no way out. Only after reading the description did I understand :)

The final "win" dialogue feels a bit out of place since it is reported by the browser rather than the game :P I started to really have some fun after I figured the eating part out.

Words Words Words by RandyTayler 2021-04-27T21:31:48Z

As others have mentioned the seclection is difficult especially on the knife and the light bulb, since they are thin and rotate a bigger collision box would probably do the trick :)

I got stuck since I didn't find the object for the "kill and kill" riddle. The laughter is great, the voice in general actually :D And I like the music, especially the low notes, they have a nice vibrato on them :)

Rooted by Webox 2021-04-27T17:43:34Z

I almost stopped playing and tell you that the input doesn't work for me. Because the root didn't move on the initial screen and neither clicking nor enter or anything else started the game. I though it was broken. Turns out I had to click a specific area in the text in order to start. I'd recommend to use a more button-looking element to click on next time (instead of text that looks like regular text :)

Looks really nice visually! The most pressing visual thing I would have attempted to fix is the sprite that moves when you extend your branch. I assume it was the easiest way to do it this way. But if you would have used the endpoint of the root on a transparent background during the transition it might have looked better. Just as a suggestion :)

Another thing which is a bit annoying is that the branch-of-curser resets to the beginning if an invalid selection was made. Would have been nice if it would just stay there in close proximity of the invalid selection.

The level where you really start to run low on resources (maybe level 4 or something) was really nice to understand how you wanted the player to play the game. Loved it!

If I am right next to a water source I am still required to make an extra move onto it. That extra move doesn't cost any energy. I think you could have just connected the root to the water automatically once it moves right next to it. This is more relevant when you pass by a water source since you'll have to go back and connect it at some point.

The second last level seems to have louder sound. Or maybe it's just my ears :P Not much of an issue though :)

I had great fun playing your game. I really appreciated your feedback on my game as well. Maybe drop your twitter (or something) here in the comments if you would like to stay in touch. See you :)

Rooted by Webox 2021-04-27T18:18:55Z

@webox I gave you a follow on Twitter. Hit me up if you find something interesting about game dev or maybe even want to do a jam together at some point ^^

Evolve or Die by Lazzor 2021-04-29T21:43:36Z

I took me a few attempts until I figured out how the game works. The first stage seems to be a bit hard since one starts the game blind and needs to know quite a few things already. Maybe unlocking different fish parts when going deeper would have made this a bit easier (take away options in the beginning to reduce complexity).

The fish building idea is ridiculus, I would have never thought of that :D I also liked that you though of increasing the speed of the simulation. That would have otherwise been quite painful :P

Deeper Trance by dhim 2021-04-26T16:32:06Z

Thank you for the web app. The best way to share your game :D The music just stared playing while I am writing this. Love it!

Dude, this is sick. I started in fullscreen and I never really had issues with seeing these things. But it took me about 30 seconds I think. I don't know how far I've come because the timer resets so quickly and I was still in trance mode. Would be great to have a "high score" that showed the best score at all times.

Really love the idea. I didn't know this worked on screens as well. Sick!

Edit: Oh I didn't see my score in the esc menu. Damn. This could probably be more intuitive if the high score is near the current score.

Depths of Hope by gustavo.christino 2021-04-28T14:07:40Z

I've played this with a friend. We had a great laught everytime we found a shark. We are still descending... Is there anything down there?

Most of the buttons didn't work as well. We could only use the analog stick. The music and the submarine sprite were great!

Deep Within by Untitled Studios 2021-04-26T19:24:53Z

I liked the idea that the money doesn't seem to spawn back when you die so you have to go deeper. The shooting was a bit unfair because I had a hard time missing the shots. That is probably the main thing I would improve. The music was amazing.

They Know We Know by gregoire_d 2021-04-29T12:02:51Z

You made good use of the resources you had. 8 people for 3 days is basically 24 days for one person. And I think the result is very good for 24 days! Well done! The ending was a bit abrupt ... maybe I didn't understand it. :P There are a few really interesting visual effets in there. The guidance on the top left was a bit too explicit in my opinion. I prefer more of a "figure it out yourself" approach rather than being told what to do step by step. Nevertheless, this was a great experience :)

SUPER RED by neonjeff 2021-04-26T19:53:43Z

I was confused at first because I zommed out and didn't see anything happening until I realized that I was this tiny worm :P The music is sick. The effort you put into it really pays off. I would have probably made the pool area (not the water) smaller. I was moved onto land by the cat and thought that was the idea. So I searched around until I found the exit. I am going to look into your source to see how did the masking. Not sure how I would do it and I would like to know how you did :D

SUPER RED by neonjeff 2021-04-26T20:54:13Z

@neonjeff I liked our conversation in the comments of my game. Would you like to stay in touch? Hit me up on Twitter if you want (I would like to prefer not to paste any email addresses here). My twitter is: https://twitter.com/NoelWidmer

Trposhi by mira 2021-04-28T14:23:19Z

Is there a way to get dead dwarfs back? We loved the death guys and their whisling. We didn't understand why we weould want to sleep if we can just drink ... The noises were A+ create work on that :D

ATOMIC deepness by Kevin Meissner 2021-04-26T16:02:22Z

I just deleted my Dropbox about two weeks ago. Now I had to create a new account :D And a tip for the files: I'd recommend to use a seperate download link for the game and a sepearte one for the source. Because searching through these files to find the exe might just take a few seconds but could be avoided :) Now I am going to play the game. Let's go!

- Love the main menu graphics. It feels like a lot of time went into that. Edit after second startup: I think the lighting is much better in the main menu than the room. I understand that the romms must be dark, but you also loose a lot of detail there. - The Cockroach looks great in the main menu. I would therefore have tried to add mor light in the rooms to bring the details out more. - The main menu doesn't mention jumping as a control. Figured this out after I got the first upgrade. - Would be nice to know when a room is clear. - I am currently just spamming my left mouse button because there is no reason not too (no magazine size or overheat or something else). If you give the player an ability make sure to give him a reason not to use it :) - Really like how the light performs when it hits radiated walls. The shader (I assume) does a good job here :) - Not sure what I need to jump for though. And the upgrades therefore don't make much sense to me. As said before I would have probably tried to give the player a reason not to shoot. And then the upgrade could soften that penalty. Such as "each upgrade rewards you 1 extra round in your magazine. - I love how you try to keep the player playing by carrying over some state into the next attempt. - Would be nice to see the current floor number somewhere on the UI. - Would be nice to be able to get some health back. - How do I end the game? -> Navigates to dashboard and force quits the app. Edit after second startup: I previously wanted to end the game after clearing a room. And I didn't think of going into the next room and killing myself before I can quit.

Great game overall. It looks amazing for a jam game!

ATOMIC deepness by Kevin Meissner 2021-04-27T15:44:59Z

8 Stories is my best so far. It get's really hard on floor 8 because there are so many enemies :P Someone with shooter experience from palying on PC could probably beat my score prety quickly. I just miss half my shots :(

Capture.PNG

Tato - Potato by Noel Widmer 2021-04-26T07:05:32Z

@cavedens The issue you described is fixed now :) Just make sure not cross your own path. Especially when doing a U-turn.

Tato - Potato by Noel Widmer 2021-04-26T20:26:48Z

@neonjeff I was just about to suggest that you check out my game and try to figure out where I used a mask :P Check my changelog for update 1.0.1. Removing the colliders on the first 5 segments was a deliberate choice. Since many of my testers did quite sharp turns and ended up eating themselfs without understanding what went wrong. It's a bigger issue when using a mouse though (not sure what device you used).

Tato - Potato by Noel Widmer 2021-04-26T20:43:18Z

@neonjeff But how did you make your sprite mask look like a tube? Did you somehow draw a sprite at runtime which was then used by the mask? Because you can't use a precreated image since you don't know where the player would go... That's where I was stuck.

Tato - Potato by Noel Widmer 2021-04-26T20:48:28Z

@neonjeff And here I was thinking you solved the problem :D I am using thousands of colliders inside the potato to have an accurate detetction of the players actions. That's where I started to run into performance issues as well :P Having play testers with slower machines is really helpful :)

Tato - Potato by Noel Widmer 2021-04-26T21:54:28Z

@fargred With a touch mouse? Sick! I tried that during developement and ... well it didn't go that well for me :D

Tato - Potato by Noel Widmer 2021-04-27T17:13:46Z

@webox Thank you very much. I absolutely agree. I would change that sound as well if I was allowed to. The sound was made at around 2am here in Zurich Switzerland; the compo ended at 3am. Therefore I decided to use what I had instead of spending my last few minutes on something better :)

Tato - Potato by Noel Widmer 2021-04-27T18:57:20Z

@xpycm They are supposed to be raindrops and will make a trip outside the potato more dangerous by slowing you down.

Tato - Potato by Noel Widmer 2021-04-27T18:58:19Z

@txanevk I would love to see your score after playing for a while. You must have gotten really good at it! :D

Tato - Potato by Noel Widmer 2021-04-28T12:39:51Z

[VoDosGames](https://www.twitch.tv/vodosgames) just streamed my game and reached a new high score. Congrats!

Capture2.PNG

Tato - Potato by Noel Widmer 2021-04-29T21:22:55Z

@lazzor Wow. You made it into the 50's! That is where one one must really start to understand how the game works. Going to head over to your game now :P

Tato - Potato by Noel Widmer 2021-05-02T19:16:52Z

@gnevesdev and @lokt02 In version 1.0.1 (see change logs above) I made the first 5 body parts non-collidable. It's not a bug; this is by design. Because players kept hitting themself when doing sharp turns which felt really unfair.

Tato - Potato by Noel Widmer 2021-05-04T07:29:48Z

@thegreenworm Agree. The screams went a bit wild :P I had a look in your source code after I played your game. What is a tweener? The internet seems to have mixed definitions for it :D

Tato - Potato by Noel Widmer 2021-05-11T07:55:31Z

@ratrat44 Holy cow! You've beaten the Ludum Dare record and even the record which my team at work was able to achieve (which was 67). How long did you play to achieve such a run?

Deep in sh... by kwaku 2021-04-27T18:36:36Z

I was about to stop playing when I reached the end. Love the graphics and the sound! Did you create the sound by yourself? Because in the credits it says "Freesound". If you used assets created by other people make sure to opt out of the affected category. Audio in this case.

The controls were a bit too clumsy. But I figured out how to descent really quickly at some point. Not sure if that was an exploit or by design :)

Dwarven Delver by cavedens 2021-04-26T01:52:49Z

To me going down was a bit more obvious, also since it is the main metric shown. It's cool that the last level is persistet across sessions. That is something I descoped in my game :) I really like the main menu, the "death" screen and the music. The art is really nice :) After playing a few levels I am still unsure how I can tell where and if an object appears. And it also seams like the esiest way is to just move straight down through the soft soil and avoiding the hard rocks. There are lots of power-ups but I didn't feel like I needed them. These could have been made into a more central part of the gameplay.

Fairy Snares by ElllaDee 2021-04-28T10:08:30Z

I love the art. The background art style is very astethic and the characters look very well done as well. Having some animation playing for the blonde girl would have given her a bit more liveliness.

The background for the textbox seems a bit too large. There are usually only a few lines of text but yet it still covers half the screen, hiding all the beautiful art.

The first time I played I fell into the first pit and I think there is no way to get out or restart the game when that happens. So I had to force quit the app and launch it again. The second time the same happens. On my third attempt I figured out that there is a double jump :P

The atmosphere is really great which is what kept me restarting the app until I reached "the end" (at least I think I managed to get to the end).

These are the issues I would attempt to prioritize to fix: - restart the player when they fall into a pit - the esc menu doesn't seem to work at all. I could have used that to manually reset my player. - add some sort of non-verbal tutorial to teach the player that a double jump exists. Without letting them jump into the pit until they figure it out. Check out this video about how mario levels are built in 4 steps. The first step is what I am talking about: https://bit.ly/3eAjJCR - the animation states seem to be a bit broken. The character is "falling" even though he stands on flat ground.

Thank you very much for sharing your game. It was interesting to look at the art while listening to the very fitting music :)

Khazads by vsi- 2021-04-29T10:01:25Z

I liked how you changed the camera size on the different levels. I assume it was necessary because the maze would have otherwise been revealed. But it was still a nice touch. It took me a while to figure out how to make the boss vulnerable again. And at first I didn't understand that the skeletons were hitting me because there is no visual or audio feedback when getting hit by them. I liked the experience. Thanks for sharing :D

ROOTS by TheGreenWorm 2021-04-29T13:57:51Z

Love the game so far. It would be nice though if we could skip the final "cutscene" when in time trial mode (basically after the first completion). Waiting for the plant to grow can take some time when watched a few times.

Survive in the deep by txanevk 2021-04-27T19:02:15Z

The moving type face looks really nice! Is it some sort of shader?

Survive in the deep by txanevk 2021-04-27T19:57:31Z

@txanevk Ah I see. I've never used construct. Interesting to know :D

Jackhammer Joe by Wall Jump Games 2021-04-26T19:13:03Z

Just here to inform you that your youtube channel link in the description above is broken :(

1100 by Xpycm 2021-04-26T19:27:48Z

I don't have an android. I'm sad...

Into the Abyss by oeschmid 2021-04-26T02:08:21Z

Really well done! It took me a while to understand what each icon does. But I guess it is not that easy to create self-explanatory sprites with such a small canvas :) I sometimes found it really hard to tell what happend because I couln't understand which pixels belonged to wich object. That is my only critique.

Ocean Snap by TheJookerful 2021-04-30T08:55:13Z

The ambient sound was a really nice piece! The fact that it's peaceful by taking pictures without harming the environemnt is a great touch. When you like a flower take a picture; don't rip it out.

Fluffy the Slime's Underground Adventure by Plazyqwerty 2021-04-26T19:36:01Z

This is really good work for a first game! You're off of a good start! A few things I noticed:

- To me it was weird that not all levels could be restarted using "r" - I would try to make the movement more accurate to the input (a lot less sliding, probably almost none).

The deepest curse by Bobafett89 2021-04-26T19:09:17Z

I love platformers and I really liked your game :) My reviews are usually centered around the things I believe could improve your game:

The double jump "tutorial" was too brutal in my opinion. Took me a while to do that. I always first try a controller (xbox) because I don't usually like wasd controls. Would have been nice if you supported controllers. I would have probably ran through 5x as fast as I did with a controller :P

The hitboxes around the spikes seem to be a bit unfair in my opinion. I understand that you want to make them as big as the sprite. But often it is a good idea to make them a bit smaller. The player should feel like it's their mistake when they hit them.

Downer Diver by MkMuffi 2021-04-26T19:42:33Z

I got hit once by a small fish :P Not sure why some of the very big fish move and others don't. I wasn't sure why moving up / down was needed until I found the big fishes and need to move up a bit. I found myself holding down all the time most of the time.

I really liked the art. especially the sea weed which you have on the side of the narrowing path. Oh and the chicken thing is really cute too :D

Cat Sweeper by gnevesdev 2021-04-27T17:59:34Z

It took me a while to figure out how it worked. I am not too familliar with mine sweeper. Bu I finally remembered. Interesting twist on the original and well fit into the theme! Two things I would have tried to do differently: - Show where the bomb is located once it blows up. And give the player some time to figure out where they went wrong. - Show some sort of progress.

Bob's Depth by phealsout 2021-04-26T16:16:21Z

Hi! I am sorry but I can't play the game because I don't know how to run it. When using unity the best thing you can do is to deploy it on itch as an html web app. Just make sure to turn compression off in the build settings or it won't run in some firefoxes.

Or alternativly provide an exe and whatever is used on linux :) (But seriously the web app is so much more comfortable and will make sure much more people play your game.)

Notify me using @ and my username when you fixed it and I'll gladly come back, play and rate your game :)